Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 on January 16, 1865, after meeting with Black ministers in Savannah, Georgia. It reserved a strip of coastal land in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida for freed families, in plots of up to 40 acres. The Army also lent some families mules. Roughly 40,000 freed people settled on the land.
After Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson pardoned many former Confederates and ordered their land returned. By the end of 1865, most of the freed families had been forced off. Congress also rejected broader plans to break up plantations and redistribute them.
The phrase became shorthand for the land and wealth that were promised and taken back. Without land, many freed people had little choice but to work as sharecroppers on white-owned plantations. Today the phrase is central to the case for reparations, including H.R. 40, a bill to study reparations first introduced in Congress in 1989.